You see, there was that video rental store on my neighbourhood, with an amazing gaming set featuring a giant TV set and a huge controller. Generally Amiga and Neo Geo games were on. There was an Amiga game the store owner's son played often: he controlled some kind of camp counselor with his baseball cap and his sunglasses, blasting beasts on a world of bright greens and oranges. It mesmerized me.It wasn't until many years later that I actually tried this game by French developer Loriciels. It was the unfinished Mega Drive port (It was ported to Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Super Nintendo and PC Engine CD as well.The PC, MD and SNES ports feature a redesigned Jim, much in the vein of Buck Rogers, and several stages in anaglyph 3D (they even included dedicated googles). The SNES version is infamous for its use and abuse of parallax and Mode 7. Man, one gets dizzy with this port!My fav port is the PCE one. Its backgrounds are kind of ugly: they lack detail and colour. Morover, the fake anime intro is preposterous, but it's a fairly faithful translation of the Amiga version and it controls way better (which doesn't mean it controls well), featuring an actual jump button. It features Chris Hüllsbeck's awesome BGM in CD quality. However, it's not a game for everybody. Like many Eurocrap titles of the era, one must be used to this kind of games: one-hit deaths featuring our famous mortal water drops, enemies appearing suddenly, creating a trial-and-error gameplay, unfair collision detection, especially in the platforming areas...And yet, with all these shortcomings, I love it: these are the games I grew with back in the times where I had a Spectrum +2.

Enjoyed the write up. People of dismissive of Euro games of this period usually due to the difficulty and usually convoluted one button control schemes. But if you grew up with them you soon adapted these systems and games were our NES.

Sut wrote:Enjoyed the write up. People of dismissive of Euro games of this period usually due to the difficulty and usually convoluted one button control schemes. But if you grew up with them you soon adapted these systems and games were our NES.

Thanks, and it's quite true: micros and their rather infamous (but it was what we got, so we carried on) control scheme were our thing back then. Even when the Master System and the NES (and the Atari 7800) started to gain momentum, these old computers lasted until the early 90s.

VideoGameCritic wrote:Jim Power is one of the few 16-bit platformers I've yet to acquire. I think I'll go with the SNES version.

The PCE version must be really, REALLY, expensive, so, yup, it's better to go with the SNES port, though it lacks that radikal 90s ‘tude Jim that makes the computer and PCE versions so charming (well, depending on who you ask).